Hello everybody,

it has been a long time I have not posted here…

I adopted the mime-support package in 2012 and in 2020 I split it into media-types, which contains just /etc/mime.types, and then mailcap,
which contains the rest. At each stable release, media-types is quite
well synchronised with the IANA's list of media types.

I am less proud of my work on mailap. To be honest, I have neglected
it. At the moment it is a Debian native package, and to give it more
chances to keep up, I would like to turn it into an upstream project
that has better chance to attract contributors beyond Debian and its derivatives.

Mailcap is mostly single Perl script, plus some documentation and Debian-specific triggers which are not essential out of the context of a packaging system. I have been wondering if it would make sense to
distribute it as App::Mailcap on CPAN. And I would be happy to have
your feedback, about this idea.

Here is the source code:

https://salsa.debian.org/debian/mailcap

Have a nice week-end,

--
Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan Tooting from work, https://fediscience.org/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy

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On Saturday, 16 March 2024 15:59:43 CET Charles Plessy wrote:

Mailcap is mostly single Perl script, plus some documentation and Debian-specific triggers which are not essential out of the context of a packaging system. I have been wondering if it would make sense to
distribute it as App::Mailcap on CPAN. And I would be happy to have
your feedback, about this idea.

If you think mailcap can be useful outside of Debian, why not. But you'll probably have to modernize this program, add "use strict", "use warning", add
a Builder, write man page in pod format. Otherwise, mailcap will be less attractive.

On the other hand , mailcap man page mentions that it should be used with metamail. This program is not found on Debian. I fear that most people are using IMAP to read mail and I wonder if mailcap can fit there...

HTH

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Dominique Dumont <dod@debian.org> writes:

On the other hand , mailcap man page mentions that it should be used
with metamail. This program is not found on Debian. I fear that most
people are using IMAP to read mail and I wonder if mailcap can fit
there...

I think the question is are there any clients that use the external
run-mailcap program to look up an entry and dispatch the content, or does everyone parse the data directly now. metamail was an even more sweeping implementation of the idea that programs could delegate their MIME implementation to an external suite of commands, and I think every
surviving mail reader has stopped using it at this point.

sources.debian.net turns up a few uses of run-mailcap (xdg-utils, mc, Qt), which implies to me that this is still useful. (But the mention of
metamail could probably be removed or moved to a historical section.) Ironically given the history, I think all of the uses of run-mailcap I saw
may be for either web-related uses or for handling arbitrary files, rather
than for the original context of mail or netnews clients.

--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

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